This week's chronicle from Silicon Valley by Jean-Louis Gassée (CEO of Be Inc, and a Linux user) is rather interesting. He points out that Apple's testimony is unexpectedly strong evidence in favour of the DOJ, even though it relates to events occuring back in the 1980s (see below). Jean-Louis points out that the foundations of Microsoft's domination of PCs and Macs had been layed even before the Mac came out in 1984. Apparently the DOJ is so sure it will win it has started probing Silicon Valley experts as to what remedies would be effective. Dividing Microsoft up into pieces has apparently been discounted since Microsoft could effectively continue building apps into its OS by hiring more people to the OS division. The favorite contender is to force Microsoft to licence the Windows source code to three of its competitors. To me, this is ineffective: Microsoft could convincingly claim that its three competitors did not write the code and do not understand it as well (so you should rely on Microsoft for support) and make sure this is true by sending the final builds to the competition as late as possible. My sysadmin and I had a discussion which resulted in an alternative remedy: Win32 and the Windows kernels should be GPL'd with Microsoft losing all its rights as original copyright holder. This would prevent Microsoft from integrating other stuff into the kernel because they'd lose any unfair competitive advantage (think proprietary APIs) by doing so. If you'd like to support this idea, write to Joel Klein! As usual, Babelfish is your friend.

Microsoft is not going to wait for the outcome of its trial with the DOJ before attacking Linux. The battle scene is France, where Microsoft's new (expendable?) regional director Marc Chardon has just issued an open letter to his clients. Click below to read the translation of the Linux-section (it's in French) and some commentary.

Bruce Stephens has written in with a writeup on something he considers pretty cool- perhaps you'll agree. It's about something you may not have heard of:ANDF. Looks interesting for the hardcore.

Alan Cox has submitted a piece he calls "Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council". It addresses a lot of really important issues for those involved with distributed software development. It's definitely a must read.

Oracle plans to distribute and support Linux, probably licensing an existing distribution to bundle with their database. However they will still support all 4 major distributions ( including I assume Redhat (US), Pacific HiTech (Japan) and SUSE (Europe)) wanting to be the people who are called if a user has a problem with Linux. Read more below.

It seems that Debian decided to stop distributing KDE both on CDROM and through the Internet.
Debian statement is here.
This story appeared at Linux Today (excellent news web site)
Fellas, please, try not to flame this time. If you have something to comment, please make yourself clear and explain if you agree or not, after all, YOUR opinion counts.

Seems that Microsoft doesn't want to stop in PC's, now they're going to manufacture....a cordless phone
According to ZDNET, Microsoft will start Selling a 900Mhz Cordless phone which you can hook to your PC and manage Caller ID and Voice mail
The price will be $199.99 and it will be availble next month
Now I wonder what will happend in the middle of important call...General Voice fault? :)

Several folks asked for it, so I figured I'd quick whip up a review of the first full length CGI film from PDI. Hit the link below to read my take on it.

S.u.S.E has released a new and well accelerated X server for the Matrox G100 & G200 cards.
Supported cards:
- Matrox Millennium G200 (SGRAM and SDRAM)
- Matrox Mystique G200
- Matrox Productiva G100
Here you can check out the details
I would like to take this opportunity to ask you which card is better: Riva TNT or Matrox G200?

After reading a lot of stories about RH/I/N (including Chuck Milam's submission from CNN) I decided to write up my opinions on the whole deal and dump them online. Hit the link below to read it if you care.

Allright, we're back in business. Long series of calamities that I won't bother to explain here. It might be a hard drive problem, so I'll be making backups every 30 seconds from here on out. Hopefully we won't have any more of these little unscheduled interuptions for awhile.

So pk has written in with a fairly important piece addressing Advocacy. There are a few folks on mailing lists, usenet and even Slashdot (boy, what a shock) who are making Linux Users look like loons with wonderful suggestions like killing KDE programmers or bombing Redmond. Flame has a place and purpose, but far to often its just a childish weapon. Anyway, pk's piece is something of a reality check and definately worth reading.

Scitech software has released Display Doctor for Linux.

This is a public beta - NOT - a full release yet.

You can check it out here
Alternatively, you can get it from FTP here

Bug reports - please submit them here
Hit the link below to see what the full version will have

Well, RedHat and XBF project keeps coming up with new developemtns. This time is a full X server for the i740 based chipset cards.

The Slash source release is wrapping up. I've decided to get a version out the door before I go to work on moderation stuff. The Look & Feel stuff is pretty much functional now (within reason). Check out Taco Hell or Slash to see how different articles on the same server can look. There are glitches yet, but for the most part, things look pretty good. Hit the link to read some notes on the moderation debates, as well as a few notes about recent changes to Slash.

We've got a problem on Slashdot. Along with amazing growth we've experienced in the last 6 months, we've suffered some of the same problems as usenet. Namely the signal to noise ratio on the comments is getting out of control. There are real gems in the comments section, but wading through 'I got the first comment!' crap, or huge rampant offtopic debates is wasting bandwidth and time of the thousands of readers who just want the good stuff. Keep reading to read the deal. Updated read the end

I typically avoid posting stuff about TMS, but Lewis A. Mettler has submitted a really excellent one eplaining Microsoft's position as a monopoly, and some of the implications of it. It's a worthwhile read, and discusses a some of what might happen with DOJ.

Philipp Koehn wrote in with a piece addressing something that always seems to come up any time you start talking about free software. His piece is called Who is the Software Communist. It's a pretty interesting read, although I suspect that most readers will disagree with it. I figure we'll hear some opinions on this one.

Steve Sergeant wrote in with a piece on your data. He talks about formats, and how they seem to unnecessarily complicate matters. Personally I think the problem is fading as most vendors have a few universal formats that interchange, but each time a new version of each app comes out, it takes months for each competitor to include import filters for the new ones.

Justin Couch (Mithrandir) writes "As one of the millions out there that use MP3 daily for work, and also as someone who writes ISO specs for a living I was rather interested in the article that got posted today about the disappearing MP3 encoder from 8hz. Almost all of the comments at least showed a lack of understanding of the ISO process so I thought I should write you an article on exactly what happens and how this situation comes about." Hit the link to read it.